Ada 83 Program Development Environment for DOS

GW-Ada/Ed for DOS
(mirror)
supports a full-language Ada 83 compiler,
which produces virtual code for execution by a virtual-machine
simulator (interpreter) included in the distribution. The compiler was
validated by the U.S. government several years ago, using ACVC version
1.7 (the current version is 1.11); 1.7 validation means that this
compiler is quite complete and accurate. If you are doing small
computations and efficiency is not a primary concern, this compiler is
very attractive.

This project was sponsored by The George Washington University, and in
part by the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) under
contract #FY3592-93-10234, administered by Phillips Laboratory, Kirtland
AFB, NM 87117-5776.

This distribution contains the executables for GWAda, which consists of
the NYU Ada/Ed translator/interpreter system for DOS, together with an
integrated editor developed by Prof. Arthur Vargas Lopes of the
Pontifical University at Porto Alegre, Brazil. Lopes began his work on
GWAda while he was a doctoral student at The George Washington
University. There is also a very nice extended runtime facility, with
interesting kinds of source tracing. The runtime was developed by
Charles Kann, a doctoral student at GW.

GWAda is being freely distributed at no charge. In the near future we
will make the source code available under the GNU General Public
License. Please understand that we are not yet providing source code
because this system is still in the developmental stage and we wish to
avoid horrible version-proliferation complications. Source code for
Ada/Ed itself is available from NYU and from WUARCHIVE.

You may in any case distribute this software as you see fit, for
educational purposes and not for profit. Include this document if you
redistribute the software, and give full credit to its originators.

GWAda is distributed as two .zip archives created by info-zip, which is
included in the distribution. Each archive will fit on a 1.44 mb
high-density 3.5" diskette.

When you un-archive the files (see the instructions below), you will
find a user manual, userman.doc, describing the GW development
environment, and a file readme.nyu file with documentation on the NYU
part of the system. Note that you do not have to use the GWAda
integrated environment, but can execute the various parts of NYU Ada/Ed
from the DOS command line, as described in the NYU instructions.

System Requirements

IBM PC Compatible, 386 or 486, running MS-DOS or PC-DOS

at least 3.6 mb available extended memory

at least 5 mb free hard disk space

Additional Libraries

We are providing a few additional libraries for you to work with. One is
a set of interesting demos developed at GWU; another is John Dalbey's
Spider Graphics; still other is an adaptation of the Portable Ada Math
Library. These are set up in separate subdirectories. A fourth
subdirectory contains a lot of interesting Ada programs supplied by NYU
as part of their distribution.

Help with the Ada Language Reference Manual

Part of the GWAda environment is a help system that assists in searching
the Ada Language Reference Manual. This hypertext-like navigational aid
is accessed from the Help menu in GWAda.

Templates in the Editor

We are experimenting with "templates" in the editor. Try selecting
options from the "Ada" menu. Some of the templates are very
straightforward control structures; others are "higher-level"
structures. You can change the contents of the templates.

Package Completion

The package is a very important structure in Ada. To help you create
packages easily, we have included in the editor a facility that will
automatically create the skeleton of a package body once you have
constructed and compiled the specification. See the user manual for
further details.

Runtime Monitoring

This system incorporates some innovative facilities for letting you
observe the behavior of your program as it executes. When you start
executing a program, a window opens to show you its source code, and
scrolls the code, line-by-line, during execution. You can also "single-
step" through the code; pressing the space bar advances the execution
one more line. In addition, if your program calls a subprogram, a window
opens for the subprogram, overlapping the calling program's window.
Finally, you can control the execution speed of your program with a
"speed control."

If your program contains multiple Ada tasks, the runtime monitor will
let you follow the execution of the various tasks as they are "time-
shared". You can open up to four windows to show task source code. See
the user manual for further details.

This program is distributed free of charge for educational purposes, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.